stately barouche and pair to convey us to Jamrud, at the entrance of the pass, at sunrise, and that he would speed us on thence toward Afghanistan and the elusive, illusive, ever-moving frontier in light dog-carts of the variety known to the natives as the "tum-tum" (tandem). All this for sixteen rupees, "and what your ladyship may please."
As "that narrow sword-cut in the hills" was open and guarded only on Tuesdays and Fridays, the two caravan days of each week, there was stir in Peshawar city and cantonment that day. Long caravan trains of camels and donkeys were then filing out and across the dusty plain to pass the night in the fortified serai below Jamrud fort, ready for a sunrise start through the defile to Lundi Khana at the Afghan end, where no white traveler goes, save by very special arrangement with civil and military authorities.
Peshawar, once an Afghan city in fact, still bears all its Persian and Central Asian characteristics; and this flat-roofed city within its great mud walls is also a metropolis, a little Paris for all Central Asia, whither flock Afghans and turbaned folk from over the border to shop and spend their money, to luxuriate and dissipate in all the ways of Orient and Occident there combined, and to hatch fresh conspiracies against Pax Britannica, One must read his Kipling to enjoy Peshawar, and must see Peshawar and its people fully to enjoy Kipling. All through "The Man Who Would be King," "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "The Man Who Was," "The Lost Regiment," and "Wee Willie
